My first henna experience.

When we came to Singapore on our look-see visit, Chef Boyardee and I visited Little India. It was during Deepavali, the Hindu Festival of Light, and the sights and sounds and smells were intoxicating. I got a henna tattoo on my hand, and instantly fell in love.

Henna makes me feel beautiful. I love the contrast of the dark brown design against the whiteness of my skin. I somehow feel more graceful, more feminine when my hand is adorned with a delicate work of art.

Yesterday my friend Kate and I spent a lovely evening wandering around Little India. Surprisingly, not much has changed since I was there last. While I was waiting for Kate to get her eyebrows threaded, I checked out the henna design books. And I just couldn’t resist. You can see the results in the slideshow below.

The best expat mom in the world: mine.

In honour of Mother’s Day, I humbly offer this ode to all those amazing women who organize international relocations, feather new nests in strange lands, guide their children through the choppy waters of integration, and generally hold their family together as they build new lives abroad.

You know you’re an expat mom when…

• You can reel off the police/fire/ambulance emergency numbers for several countries.
• You don’t leave the house without a supply of tissues in your bag, just in case the public bathroom doesn’t have toilet paper.
• You no longer use the word “bathroom.”
• Your children come home from school speaking another language. Or, bizarrely, their mother tongue with a foreign accent.
• You have to repeatedly tell the maid not to clean your kids’ bedrooms. How else will they learn responsibility?
• People stare. A lot. And you actually get used to it.
• You worry your children will forget their roots, and keep reminding them what things are like “back home.”
• You no longer keep an emergency stash of goldfish crackers in your bag. You carry mami noodles instead.
• You rush your child to the Emergency Room and have to use sign language to explain what’s wrong. You discover you’re pretty good at charades.
• You often hear things like, “Tilde’s mom cooks the best kåldolmar. How come you never make them?”
• You find yourself wondering if you should embrace your inner Tiger Mom.
• You go to the skating rink with your child’s class,  and everyone waits for you to execute a perfect triple axel. Because after all, you’re Canadian, aren’t you? You feel you’ve let your country down when you have to admit you can barely manage a single.
• When you talk about home to your children, you have to stipulate which one.
• Your kids could go through the pre-boarding routine blindfolded, and have very strong opinions about which airports have the best business lounges.
• You worry that they’re spoiled.
• You need a dictionary to read your child’s report card, and when you discover that pipelette means “chatterbox,” you’re so delighted to learn a new word that you forget to reprimand the chatty child in question.
• You have to confirm that yes, you did send Santa a change-of-address card. Ditto the Easter Bunny.
• You sit through an entire parent-teacher interview, and when it’s over, the only thing you’re absolutely sure of is that the teacher has great taste in shoes.
• Your children speak “taxi driver” better than you do.
• You inadvertently serve horsemeat for dinner, and your youngest child doesn’t speak to you for days. Your older child, however, thinks it’s delicious.
• You answer to “Maman.”
• You start a sentence with “If I had a nickel for every time…” and your kids ask “What’s a nickel?”
• They have 400 Facebook friends, but only 10 of them live within a 5 kilometre radius.
• They’d rather eat mutton satay than pepperoni pizza.
• You pass a bunch of local kids at the mall, and it takes a moment to realize your child is one of them.
• Your kids come home from their music lesson and ask,  “How do you say fa dièse in English?” You have no idea, because you haven’t the foggiest idea what fa dièse means. Also, you’ve never studied music.
• You look forward to UN Week.
• Once you’ve repatriated, your kids complain — constantly — about their French teacher’s poor pronunciation.
• When you’re on Home Leave:
  • You keep packets of chili sauce in your purse.
  • You’re driving to yet another play date when your little one looks out the window and shouts “Hey look! They have Ikea here too!”
  • You leave Chinese restaurants loaded down with free fortune cookies because the waiters can’t get over the fact that your blonde, blue-eyed daughters speak Chinese.
  • You prattle on about the IB, PYP, and IGCSEs, earning even more blank stares than usual.
  • You have to explain to your disappointed children that there’s no such thing as a bakery on every corner here, and by the way, they won’t find any hawker centres, either.
• You can’t decide if you’ve given your children the best experience of their lives, or if you’ve caused irreparable damage to their psyches.
• You realize that, given the chance, you’d do it all again.

This list is based solely on my experience raising Canadian kids in Singapore and France. What can you add, based on your expat experiences?

I arrived yesterday morning, a day late (thanks to a 10-hour delay at Pearson Airport that made me miss my connecting flight at Heathrow), but that didn’t matter — despite sleeping only four hours out of the previous 36 (or perhaps because of it), I was giddy with anticipation as the plane made its final approach. It passed through cotton candy clouds and made its descent just as the sun was rising over the water. And then — I know it’s a cliché but I swear I’m not making this up — a rainbow appeared. Hollywood itself couldn’t have scripted a better opening scene.

The first omen for what was to follow came before I’d even left the airport. Because we travelled a lot when we lived in Singapore, I used to spend quite a bit of time in Changi (the best damn airport in the world.) Every time we got off a plane, I would pause for a minute at the top of the stairs overlooking Immigration. Seeing the tidy lines of travellers waiting to get their passports stamped told me I was back in Singapore, and I always took a moment to savour the delicious feeling of coming home that would wash over me. I don’t know whether I arrived in a different terminal or my memory was playing tricks on me, but this time it didn’t look quite the same as I remembered. It certainly didn’t feel the same.

Once I’d stowed my luggage at my friend Kate’s house, I headed out to become reacquainted with my city. It quickly became apparent that I’d forgotten some of the basic rules I learned in Singapore Life 101: Don’t bother blow-drying your hair; it’ll only frizz up in the humidity. Don’t bother putting on makeup; it’ll slide off your face within five minutes. And for heaven’s sake, don’t look to the left before crossing the road unless you want to get pulverized by a Rolls Royce (a fate I managed to avoid, but just barely.)

Our first house in Singapore.

I decided to visit my old house and get the nostalgia trip out of the way, but getting lost en route wasn’t part of the plan. Who gets lost going home? When I finally stood in front of the house where I’d raised my kids, made great friends and was as happy as I’ve ever been, I was shocked to discover I felt no emotional attachment whatsoever. It was just a place where I once lived, nothing more.

I trudged back to Orchard Road, trying to make sense of what was happening. By this time I’d been outside maybe half an hour. My tank top was soaked, my hair was plastered to the back of my neck, and my throat was parched. My body was giving me a clear message: it was no longer able to cope with the heat and humidity it once handled with ease.

The weirdness continued. My very first purchase in Singapore was a bottle of water — pretty hard to mess that up, right? Wrong! I promptly broke the left-hand rule, handing the money — to a Malay girl in a hijab, to add insult to injury — with my “unclean” left hand. And then, not twenty minutes later, I did it again. I’m blaming that one on jet lag.

It was a strange day, but an illuminating one. I’d been thinking of this trip as a sort of reverse home leave, but clearly, the country has relinquished that role in my life. It has moved on, and so have I. Yesterday I finally understood that while you can revisit a place, there’s no revisiting a time — those days are gone forever. So although I will cherish till my dying day the time I spent here, Singapore no longer has a hold on me. I’m just a tourist now.

That little epiphany released me from the tyranny of regret and made me free to enjoy the rest of my holiday. And now that I’ve stopped looking backwards and can concentrate on the future, I’m free to enjoy the rest of my life as well.

Unless this is just the jet lag talking. In which case, scratch that.

This wonderful country was my home from 2003 to 2006. We’ve both changed over the years — from what I’m told, Singapore has grown so much that parts of it will be unrecognizable to me.

That fluttery feeling in the pit of my stomach is equal parts anticipation and apprehension. Will I still feel the same, or has the spark between us died? Stay tuned for more …

When the first laugh popped out, it took me by surprise. I checked to see if anyone had noticed, and caught the man at the next table quickly averting his eyes.

A few minutes passed and it happened again. This time my seatmate studiously avoided looking in my direction.

The third time, he quietly packed up his things and left without a backward glance.

You have to understand: I’m not really a laugh-out-loud kind of reader. I’m more of a smiler. When I read something that tickles my funny bone, I mentally tip my hat to the author, engage my zygomaticus muscles for a brief moment, and move on. This time, however, there would be no moving on.

The book that so captivated me was “Diplomatic Incidents” by Cherry Denman, who establishes her expat cred with a breezy, “Many years ago, in a moment of absent-minded self-indulgence, I married a diplomat.” (I’m warning you now: I’m going to be ramming this delightful book down your throats for the rest of my days. Prepare yourselves accordingly.)

By the time it was done I’d racked up 16 LOLs and scared off another Starbucks patron. But Denman is so much more than just a screamingly funny writer. She’s a card-carrying member of the Expat Spouse Club, having stumbled through postings in Hong Kong, China, Libya and Cyprus, raising two children along the way. In other words, she gets it. Only an expat could write something like this:

“I have moved around the world for twenty-five years now and I still cry for three months every time I arrive in a new place. Yet I would not have missed a single day, left out a single experience or not met a single person. Every bizarre incident and every strange accident broadens your heart in a way that living safely and comfortably can never do.”

The entire memoir is studded with gems like that. In fact, it would have been more efficient (not to mention easier on the eyes) to highlight the bits I didn’t find pithy, thought-provoking, or pant-peeing hilarious. Instead, thanks to my highlighting frenzy, the pages are now blindingly, violently yellow. So I’m afraid you’ll just have to get your own copy.

That beautiful animal in the photo on the left is my Labrador Retriever, Jeff. He was born a few weeks after we returned to Canada, and has been wreaking havoc in bringing joy to our lives ever since.

Had I met Jeff earlier, he could have taught me a thing or two about being a successful expat. All is not lost, however: he’s got plenty of advice about how to handle repatriation, too.

Get out there and meet people. My dog, as it turns out, is a bit of an introvert. He doesn’t like crowds (or yappy dogs), but he’ll say an enthusiastic hello to any non-yappy creature that crosses his path. He’s made some good friends as a result, and he plays with them every day on our morning walk. If Jeff stayed home watching Lassie reruns and snacking on kibble all day long, he’d be missing out on a lot of fun.

Appreciate the simple things. It’s easy to get caught up in the expat high life. Champagne brunches, live-in domestic help and exotic travel are all nice to have, but Jeff never fails to remind me what’s really important. Aside from the necessities — food, water, and the occasional scratch behind the ears — as long as he’s surrounded by the people he loves, he’s content.

Sniff around. Take Jeff outside and his nose goes into overdrive. I’ll admit this can be frustrating: the pace of our walks is determined by the number of interesting smells he encounters. (The ratio is generally three steps to one sniff.) But I admire his curiosity. He never stops exploring his environment, and if his tail-wagging is any indication, he always discovers something worthwhile.

Bury your treasures. Then dig them up. Your friends back home don’t want to hear how wonderful your life is (or was, if you’ve repatriated.) They don’t want to hear you complain about it, either. Unless you plan to alienate everyone outside your expat circle, it’s probably best not to start each sentence with “When I lived in ____”. You can always dig those memories up for people who show genuine interest.

Be welcoming.  Jeff is actually most unwelcoming when the doorbell rings — he likes to pretend he’s a vicious guard dog. But once a person steps over the threshold, Jeff rolls out the red carpet. He’s excited to have company, and boy, does it show. You don’t have to wag your tail so hard your whole body shakes, or deposit squeaky toys at anyone’s feet, but opening your home to new friends will make you feel less alone and much more settled.

Shed what you no longer need. Spring is here, which means Jeff is shedding his winter coat. (And we, unfortunately, are knee-deep in dog hair.) Wouldn’t it be great if we could slip our old skins so easily? If we could discard the resentments, attitudes, and mounds of stuff that are holding us back from who we want to be? A major life transition is a perfect time to take stock of your goals and eliminate whatever’s holding you back from achieving them.

Enjoy the journey. The sight of a dog hanging his head out the window of a car, ears flapping behind and tongue lolling in the breeze, never fails to make me smile. Jeff loves the car, and he often comes with me when I pick the kids up from work or school. He knows it’s not the destination that matters, but the journey. Now tell me: don’t I have a clever dog?

Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?

Robert Browning

When I wear my favourite sweat pants, I feel like I’m encased in a fleecy womb: safe and cozy and warm. They’re so comfortable, I want to wear them all the time. Unfortunately, they make me look like a hobo. They sag in the bum and bag at the knees. This is not, as my children never fail to remind me, a good look.

Being comfortable is my default mode. During the cold months, you can find me curled up in front of the fireplace with a good book (wearing my hideous sweat pants, of course.)  But I’m starting to realize that, like many people with busy lives, I’ve become far too comfortable with comfort.

Motivational speaker T. Harv Eker declares that, “Nobody ever died of discomfort, yet living in the name of comfort has killed more ideas, more opportunities, more actions, and more growth than everything else combined. Comfort kills!”

As over-the-top as that sounds, T. Harv makes a good point. Studies have shown that the best way to improve a skill is to push ourselves to attempt something more difficult than we can easily handle — not so hard as to get discouraged, but just hard enough to challenge us. It’s in that stretching that we grow.

This is usually referred to as moving out of one’s comfort zone, or as expats call it, “everyday life.” It’s the antithesis of comfy sweats: an adrenaline-producing, heart-thumping, jump-off-a-cliff leap into the unknown. Definitely not comfortable, but that’s the point: You can’t move forward if you’re standing in place.

Graphic: Bill Burns, theownershipproject.com

Time to retire those sweat pants? Oh yeah. I want to be where the magic happens. How about you?

Pompeii victim, preserved in volcanic ash.

Many years ago, Chef Boyardee and I visited Pompeii. We walked down the Via dei Sepolcri (carefully avoiding the grooves made by chariots 2,000 years ago); admired the fresco of Priapus, the god of fertility; and examined the remains of an unfortunate victim, perfectly preserved by the volcanic ash that engulfed the city in 79 AD. It was amazing, and when we returned home, I told everyone I knew about it.

Some years later, Elder Daughter and I visited Auschwitz. It was also amazing, but in a completely different way. Not only did I not talk about it when we returned home, I didn’t tell many people we were going in the first place.

Both Pompeii and Auschwitz are sites of terrible suffering and tragedy. Why did one feel like a delightful day out, while the other felt like a ghoulish intrusion that left me with a lingering sense of shame?

According to John Lennon (no relation to the Beatle) and Malcolm Foley (no relation to me), the reason for these differing reactions is time. One visit took place two millennia after the event that wiped out the population, and the other occurred only six decades or so afterwards. Lennon and Foley, authors of Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster, write that although it’s acceptable to visit death sites immediately after a tragedy to show respect and engage in a public display of collective mourning (think Diana, for example), society demands there be a cooling-off period before there’s any attempt at “interpretation” of the calamity.

“Opportunities come later when the infrastructure has been repaired and when investment…is secured,” they write. “Under these circumstances, a former concentration camp, battle site, assassination or killing site, or the location of a disaster becomes a tourism resource to be exploited like any other.”

In their examination of dark tourism (the touristification, if you will, of sites of tragic death), the authors note that interest in these places has grown steadily since the latter part of the 20^th century. Death and tourism have become big business. The question is: why? Lennon and Foley blame “a mix of reverence, voyeurism and maybe even the thrill of coming into close proximity with death.” So of course, now I’m examining my motives for attending every dark tourist spot I’ve ever been to.

Entrance to Terezin concentration camp, near Prague.

Before I travelled to see them, I knew very little about Terezín concentration camp outside of Prague, and I’d never even heard of the Cu Chi tunnels in Vietnam. It was mild curiosity that led me there. (You can throw Tiananmen Square into that category as well.) We went to Phuket 3 months after the 2004 tsunami because we thought our tourist dollars would help with the rebuilding. In Amsterdam, I bought tickets to Anne Frank House because her story had touched me when I was a little girl, and I was curious about the secret annex where she lived.

Auschwitz/Birkenau was different. I went there because I wanted to know what evil felt like. It was the only place that made me feel soiled. I spent weeks questioning what had compelled me to go. Was I using the pain and misfortune of others for my own entertainment? Was I exploiting the dead? Commodifying misery? They were uncomfortable questions to ask, and I struggled to find satisfactory answers.

The ethical issues of dark tourism are considerable, but I hope my base curiosity is balanced by the other reason I visit macabre sites: my children. I take them with me because I want them to learn compassion in the face of suffering, and gratitude that they live in a place that’s been spared tragedies such as these.

There’s a simple stone monument at Auschwitz that is engraved with the words of Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel: “Forgetting them means letting them die again.” I don’t want to be a grief tourist. But I do want my children to bear witness and to remember.

My honeymoon period in Singapore ended the first time I went clothes shopping and discovered I’d become “plus sized” overnight. I wouldn’t have minded if it weren’t for one thing: I weighed all of 120 pounds.

That’s 54½ kilograms. Eight and a half stone. But in Singapore, thin is in. And in the land of the tai tai, I clearly wasn’t thin enough.

Singaporean women are impossibly tiny. They wear correspondingly tiny clothes that aren’t designed to accommodate the 3Bs (Boobs, Butt, Belly) that many Western expats bring with them when they relocate. I remember asking a stunningly beautiful salesgirl, who probably weighed 80 pounds soaking wet, if she had a certain dress in my size. Her gaze flickered over me from head to toe before she said dismissively, “We don’t have anything in your size.”

Ouch.

Buying bras was especially frustrating: in Singapore, the alphabet apparently stops at A. Discovering Marks and Spencer’s lingerie department was like finding a lacey oasis in the desert. There was a chart pinned to the change room door — to placate exasperated expats, I’m guessing — outlining the differences between Western breasts (“large and rounded”) and the Asian variety (“small and pointed”). I’m not sure I needed to know that, but I mentally filed it away in case I’m ever a contestant on Jeopardy.

Singapore is home to a very robust “slimming industry” that’s worth tens of millions of dollars. Search for “slimming in Singapore” and you’ll see what I mean: Google will obligingly cough up about 8,940,000 results in .24 seconds flat.

During the time I lived there, the country was captivated by the tragic story of local actress Andrea De Cruz, who almost died of liver failure thanks to bogus diet pills. It took her boyfriend’s donation of half his liver to save her life. (You can read her story on the site cosmeticsurgeryandbeauty.com. While you’re at it, take a look at the site’s tagline: “Because Nobody’s Perfect.” I know — the irony is killing me, too.)

The authors of a study published in the Singapore Medical Journal surveyed the literature to explain this preference for thinness among Singaporeans:

[E]conomic development and industrialisation are accompanied by a higher prevalence of obesity as well as increased media exposure to the norms of highly industrialised Western societies. As a result, there is a heightened level of societal concern with obesity, and values and norms relating to ideal body size change in preference for thinness, especially among adolescent females.

The pursuit of such an extreme body-type ideal can have far-reaching consequences. I’m no stranger to living in a weight-obsessed society, but it never affected me directly until I moved to Singapore. As disheartening as it was to have to forage for clothes that fit, what stung even more was the implicit message that not being a size 0 meant there was something inherently wrong with me.

While we sometimes whine about the differences we encounter in our host county, the onus is on us to adjust to them. But this issue goes deeper than a mere clash of cultures. The sad truth is that living in an environment where excessive thinness is the norm can lead to a warped body image and messed-up self-esteem for those who don’t conform to the standard. I’ve heard disturbing stories — some firsthand and many more through the grapevine — of risky weight-loss practices within the expatriate community. It’s a dangerous problem for which I don’t pretend to have a solution. I just hope that if you’re feeling overwhelmed by the unrelenting pressure to be thin, you’ll think twice before doing anything that may cause more harm than good.